


Bird Bones

by Aris



Category: Manic Street Preachers
Genre: Angst, Internalized racism, M/M, Self-Harm, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-03
Updated: 2015-02-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 00:14:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2560961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aris/pseuds/Aris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Logically, Richey knows other people have wings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Teenage Angst

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a friend - dead fandoms are my thing.

Richey finds out when he’s eleven, and the back ache he’s had for the last week comes to a sudden zenith - bursting into a sharp pain that has him arching his back out and curling around the desk in front of him, uttering a small noise of surprise and dumb, animalistic confusion at the pain. A feeling, like when he got his MMR vaccination but wrong - like it was reversed - sent shivers down his back, the edges of the newly formed wounds flaring up in slight pain at the emerge of - something.

His t-shirt feels too small at the back all of a sudden, a new heavy weight pushing against the fabric which sticks unpleasantly to his skin; wet with blood, Richey reckons distantly, feeling slightly detached. He leans his forehead completely against the desk, one hand slipping under the back of the shirt and tracing up the vertebrae of his spine, waiting for -

Oh.

_Wings._

###### 

Logically, Richey knows other people have wings. There’s moral panics about about it every other week - red top tabloids posting story after story of winged-attackers, the Daily Mail producing evidence upon evidence of dubious studies naming the winged population as mentally unstable, as freaks. Mutations.

But mutations are vital for evolution, right?

Richey runs his hand down his wings, staring into the mirror. The lighting in his room is stark, a blazing shine of white, and the shadows cast by the small cluster of black on his back are strangely elongated and a shade too-dark to be natural. The same shadows stretch out under his cheekbones, his eyes, his ribs, twisting when he blinks and deceptively still when he glares at him, eyes moments away from watering.

His wings are small, and thin. They fit neatly against his back, pressed flat to his spine and fitting into the natural dip under his shoulder blades, their trailing ends only just touching the end of his lower back. Watching carefully, he flexes them, the muscles moving smoothly together, and they stretch out to his sides, protruding past the sides of his arms like an ethereal cape. The gleam of the liquid-black feathers catch his eye in a pleasing way, and he reaches his arm around to stroke at the appendages.

The contact causes him to shiver in with unexpected bolt of pleasure, and he drops into a crouch pose, letting his wings settle back down behind his back and bringing his hands to his face.

They’re shaking.

Logically, Richey knows other people have wings - but staring into the mirror at his own dilated pupils, wings lying hyper aware against his skin, he can’t help but feel alone.

###### 

He doesn’t tell anybody about them.

They are a taboo; shameful. Richey feels wretched seeing them, sometimes. They are beautiful, as a singular thing that exists - but they are so abnormal, so horribly dark and boney, a haunting contrast to his pasty skin. There’s a way to their shape that makes the edges of Richey’s lips fall in distaste - it’s nightmarish, the kind of thing kids strap on their backs and scare each other with, the thing that you tell your friends about on camping trips, the monster in all the horror movies covered in innocent blood. Black wings, Richey has learnt, are worse than all abominations. Serial killers and rapists usually have dark wings - it’s in all their mugshots, unearthly shadows curling around their arms, a unnatural glint where the light tries to illuminate them but can only be absorbed by their utter lack of colour. Richey knows that papers aren’t always right, he isn’t - he isn’t _stupid_. But it sticks under his nails like splinters, gnawing away at him in a dull ache, the knowledge of what he is.

Freak. Unstable. There are people who would want him locked up, if they knew.

The knowledge hurts a bit - a lot - and hanging off the edge of Nicky’s bed, wings pressed uncomfortably against the sheets and eyes on the boy in question, Richey feels agelessly sad in the universe.

Nicky is propped up against the wall opposite him, carefully peeling the blue-tack from the back of a poster and talking about how much his knees hurt, and how ma’s going to take him to see the doctors again soon.

"…But he might say I can’t play football anymore, and then what will I do?" Nicky doesn’t even pause for an answer, just grumbling on and accidentally tearing a hole in the posters edge, causing his frown to deepen.

Richey can’t lose that. It’s no revelation, but the suffocating feeling weighing down his heart is. He closes his eyes.

The advantage of having small wings is that they fit under jackets and jumpers quite happily. Richey says quite, because if he presses them flat for too long they get cramped and ache uncomfortably, and he has to make up any number of excuses to get home to the safety of his room to relieve them. Rubbing the carpal joint helps soothe the pain the best, but when he lies there, stretched out on his bed and caressing his wings gently, he feels decidedly dirty. Guilty. Like he’s masturbating to some conventionally pretty girl in a magazine getting choked by a man almost twice her age- though, that’d probably be more acceptable.

Unhappy priests either way.

Then he thinks of Nicky; Nicky and his wonderfully angelic smile, and his wings will always twitch happily between his fingers, the feathers sliding between his pads like the butterflies in his stomach.

It’s almost pathetic.

###### 

"Those fucking winged bastards should be shot on sight," Flicker slurs against James’s side, hand half raised towards the TV where the BBC are reporting from the scene of a murder, a middle aged winged woman having been taken into custody. The victim was her son, and his father cries to the reporters that he thought his wife could be different - how she was humane, not like the others. He thought she could go against her nature, not be a freak. Settle down.

His red eyes makes Richey feel rotten and hollow inside.

James doesn’t reply to Flicker, though Richey is desperate for him to, the want of acceptance gnawing away at his stomach lining. He wants to know if he’s as repulsed by wings as Richey and Flicker are, if he wants to cut them at the vulnerable muscle on the back, rip the feathers out and burn them in the depths of a cremator, taking out the ashes only to throw them out at sea. But James takes a drink instead, and Sean breaks the silence by opening a bottle too vigorously, letting the top fly out and hit the wall.

Nicky laughs on Richey’s left, his elbow digging into his ribcage sharply. As subtly as he can, Richey shifts his wing a little further away - wishing he still had his jacket on. He feels all-too exposed in just a t-shirt covering the secret tucked down his back, and with the way Flicker glares up at the screen, it might be justified.

It’s always justified.

He takes a sip of his drink, putting up with Nicky’s stupidly sharp limbs just for the warmth that floods his lower abdomen at the proximity. It doesn’t mean anything.

It doesn’t.

###### 

Sometimes he’ll think bad things; things about hurting people, and for every time it crosses his mind he scratches at the skin on his arms, puts out cigarettes on his legs.

Once, he tried to pull a feather out from his wings - but it hurt too much, and he couldn’t stop crying long enough to get the courage together to try again.

###### 

Flickers gone, Nicky can’t play football anymore, and suddenly James is asking Richey to be part of the band, Sean nodding along with him.

Richey smiles.

That night, he stretches his wings out as far as they’ll go, and strokes them firmly down their length, shuddering and blanking out momentarily at the sensation that trickles down his spine like a gorgeous, rippling honey. He comes to moments later, eyes opening lazily and sight resolutely fuzzy, and watches his slack mouth close, his wings droop back down to tickle at his pelvis.

 _Manic Street Preachers,_ James says, and it feels like a beginning.


	2. Flesh Mechanic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I altered the timeline:  
> Nicky is proposing in 1995  
> Things like the death of Richey's friends and his dog have been skipped out  
> +other alterations
> 
> There's massive time jumps between each line break, just like the first one. This covers 1991-1995.
> 
> tertiaries + scapulars + primaries = part of wing anatomy

Everything starts to break down around the edges in 1991.  


They're playing a show in Oxford, them - Manic Street Preachers. James, Nicky, Sean and... Richey. _Richey_. And the scrunched up paper in his pockets is worth a damn when James wraps his tongue around those syllables. 

The lighting is yellow, bright fucking yellow, but Richey can still see her.

Her lips are a shade too dark and she stands alone, grey wings wrapped around her and reaching for the ceiling above her head, soft and large and beautifully anything but subtle in the glowing light that reaches the crowd. Her lipstick curves with her lips and Richey's wings, tiny and pathetic, huddled against his back and bound in fabric, shudder. 

There's space all around her, and Richey stares at his guitar for the rest of the set.

###### 

He leans against the bar, leopard-print coat safely in place and over his wings. They ache terribly, throbbing and cramping, and it feels like the humerus bone is being pulled a bit too tightly and is trying to tear right out of his back. Richey orders a drink, instead, and thinks about Nicky's smile when he tripped over Richey's guitar cord.

Feathers brush against his wrist.

###### 

Up close they are only lightly dappled with a deep grey, a stunning contrast to the dirty white of her angelic wings. She kisses him with her split tongue and Richey can feel the weight of her wings, feel where her centre of gravity tips. She pulls away, her ginger hair bouncing in unnatural springs and lipstick wearing at the fleshy insides of her lips.

"Will you touch my wings, Richey?" Her eyes are blue, like Nicky's. Richey's stomach drops a little, his head rushing with a sense of absence, of utter disconnect. His fingers run down her tertiaries and she shivers against him, head tipping back like his own all those years ago. Her arms fall from his shoulders and tug at his coat collar, pulling it over the bumps of his wings and letting it fall to the floor. He presses kisses on her neck, imagining it's Nicky's expanse of skin and the perfume stinging at his nose doesn't exist. 

Her t-shirt goes first, and halfway through his - she stops. 

"Oh," 

She turns Richey around and he goes, blinking and utterly unchained to his body. She pushes down on his shoulders and he sits on the closed toilet seat as her hands search across his back, skimming the material crippling his wings to his boney back. Gently, so gently he wants to cry, she pulls the fabric away from his wings and slides it down over his stomach and lower back. He feels numb and blue while his wings fall down his spine, free and wilting and unplucked weeds from Eden's garden. 

He can hear her wings shifting behind him, her beautiful, white wings reminiscent of angels and beauty - the representatives of humanities cleanliness. Of good. His are smokers lungs, withered and dark and malting where the binders pull too tight. His are the sins in every holy book, the skeletons in closets - the shadows under an inmates eyes. When her digits run through his primaries, he imagines his feathers as a sludge; sliding across her skin, dirty and sticky, sickly in their unhealthiness.

There's a silence, a pause, and then she's pressing her forehead against the top of his neck, fingers stroking through his primary coverts and ghosting across his secondaries.  


Angel tears trickle into his scapulars.

###### 

Distant from his body and wrapped up in purity, he's never come so hard in his life.

###### 

Rachel is beautiful. 

This is a fact. She has blue eyes, Like Nicky, and her smile is large and warm. She's always been nice to Richey, always know he's the best friend. Richey wishes she could be mean; something easy to hate. Bitter. Washed up.

Like him.

He hates himself for thinking it, hates himself for hating her, and hates himself for watching Nicky's large hand curl along her waist. Her dress dives low on her back, revealing her smooth, wingless skin as she leans up against the bar, laughing and warm and Nickys.

He pictures the girl from the concert, her _white white_ wings and _blue blue_ eyes and tries to squeeze out the moments where she could have been Nicky, where she could have been anything but distinctly female. She said to him - _"You should look after your wings,"_ and , and _"Oh, Richey."._ It was lovely, so lovely.

Richey has the distinctive impression he didn't deserve a moment of it. 

The drink in his hand is cold, vodka and coke (rather than coke and vodka, James would joke) and his mouth is suddenly dry. Horribly dry. And his wings ache as his shoulder bones flex to move his arm as he takes a drink, and his t-shirt brushes on scars and he stares at the empty chair opposite him. 

This aching, inhuman body is so bruised, and so alone. 

###### 

Tour is fast. Tour is cheap beer and store brand spirits, eyeliner and Nicky's fingers drumming on Richey's thigh and James's sore throat after three gigs straight. Tour is adrenaline and noradrenaline and a distinct lack of melatonin as Richey lies awake, floating off and away from his aching body only to be slugged back down by Nicky's warm body rolling into his on the bed they frequently end up sharing. 

Tour is rush, speed, and sometimes, sometimes Richey gets left behind. 

He's eleven again, pain in his back and blood on his hands. His caricature turns in the mirror before him, back slouched and eyes dark shadows in the hotels bathrooms lighting. He is hollow, piano ribs, and a starved, black beast crawls from his back - feathers wet with blood stick to his spine, bruises spilling out from their tips in sewer yellows and greens. It was hatching from under his skin, sucking the nutrients from between his shrivelling organs and reaching out to the skies - but now it lies aborted. Bleeding and sickly and Richey bites down on his hand to stop the retching. 

His sallow skin stretches over his barest structure, his thin thin skeleton and when he runs his hands through his wings, they come away in a sticky black blood. He's on a (s)low. There's an itch in his palm, one he can't scratch out, and it's telling him - begging him - for another drink. It's all very functional, he tells himself. I need to sleep. I need to stop thinking; I need a drink. Functional. 

A deep breath. 

Blood drips into the waistline of his jeans. 

###### 

Sometimes he thinks Nicky wouldn't care. 

When he isn't eating, Nicky takes his food for him. When he can't leave his bed, Nicky brings him his alcohol. When he cuts one number and four letters into his arm, Nicky thinks it's brilliant. He's his best friend, but Nicky only sees him as the concept he is. A mind, not a vessel. 

Wings, though, wings say a lot. The shadow cast behind him, into his skin, speaks more for Richey than the words he desperately scribbles out ever could. 

Nature vs nature, he thinks, and his skin boils around the end of a cigarette. 

###### 

He doesn't have the chance to tell Nicky, because alcohol is a cruel mistress and his fine motor control is shot to hell after a bottle of cheap white-label wine. 

He tripped over onto the way to his bed, and Nicky catches him, and Nicky touches them. Richey hisses and Nicky's eyes widen, open and blue and dirty with drifting eyeliner. That familiar disconnection comes back, those numbing tendrils, and it winds between Richey's ribcages, caressing the diseased tissue of his lungs and slicking his heart in tar. 

"Rich?" he can't breathe, "Rich? What the fuck? Are those-" 

Nicky breaks off. A train hits the end of the track. He takes a step back. 

Richey's legs feel like lead, feel like anyone's but his, and he lets himself tip backwards to sit on Nicky's bed, limbs out in front of him and back hunched. Nicky knows. Nicky knows. Nicky knows and he's staring at Richey. His tar stricken heart echos through his body - lower, lower. 

Everyone says you can read someones emotions in their eyes. Richey can't see shit. 

"How long?" Nicky asks, and Richey wants to scream, just a little. How long do you fucking think, Nicky? 

"It's - I... Always, Nicky." He tries to say it softly, regrettably, wants to make it clear to Nicky he doesn't wasn't them. Doesn't want this. But it grates out of his cigarette stained throat and sounds like a sick admission, instead. I've always been a _monster_ , Nicky. Always, always. 

Nicky sits down beside him. His leg doesn't brush his - Richey feels the distance like a knife to his thigh. 

Silence reigns. His own bones cut down the butterflies in his stomach, split their wings in half and watch them fall into the empty stomach acid below. 

"Can I see?" 

###### 

Nicky doesn't say 'brilliant'. Nicky doesn't laugh and Nicky doesn't cry, or get angry, or smile or scowl or frown or- 

Nicky touches them, the broken parts of Richey's self, and his face is completely blank. 

###### 

Richey expects change. Richey expects Nicky to tell everyone, and everyone to hate him. He expects James to kick him out, Flickers snarling face taking his place - someone who can goddamn play - and he expects the Daily Mail to drag up every hint of darkness the media has ever seen and say "We should have known,". 

Only a monster could cut himself without any pain. 

Only a freak could think those lyrics were worth a damn. 

Only an abomination could - 

But, Nicky doesn't tell anyone. Nicky doesn't say anything. 

It's like nothing ever happened and it makes Richey skin crawl. Everytime he wears a jacket Nicky looks at him like he knows, and Richey knows he does, and when he wears a t-shirt Nicky would stare and stare and James makes a joke out of it. "Nicky's in love with the robot!" and Sean laughs and all Richey can think about how disgusting that must be for Nicky. To be accused of loving someone like him. 

But, Nicky doesn't say anything. Not to Richey. 

Richey falls again, trips on shoes Sean left out, and Nicky doesn't help him back up. 

###### 

He tries to pull out his feathers again. 

Maybe - maybe - if he rips out these pieces of himself, maybe he can take it all back. 

###### 

Nicky proposes to Rachel, and Richey shaves off all his hair. 

There's no one left to be vain for - to himself, he is hideous. He is irreparable darkness and self-hatred, and he can never be enough. He wants that on the outside, he wants - he wants everyone to see what he sees. To know. But his self indulgence narcissism curls low in his heart and he can't tell the others. Can't let them see the rot for what it really is. 

He writes Nicky fifty love songs, and throws them in the Thames. Littering, pollution. He calls his mother while sitting on the bank, watching his selfish infatuation drift away and he doesn't know what to say. It occurs to him that maybe she has wings too, soiled broken things tucked away behind her - things she never told him about, because she didn't want him to hate her. His mouth is a cave in a drought, a carcass in the sun. He can't quite clear his throat enough to sound normal. 

Instead, he tells her that he misses her, and will miss her when he's in America. In America, certain wings colours will earn you a death sentence, if the wrong people find out. 

He hopes. 

###### 

What happens is: 

Richey is taking a shower. 

Blood runs down the drain from Richey's back, coats his legs and stains the wall where he leans against it. He stares at the dip after his ribs, the hollow there. He thinks he can see the lump where his organs protrude, thinks the papery skin is covering something he wants to tear out. He digs his nails into his wings instead, and watches the blood run a shade lighter around his toes. 

Everyday he feels a little further away. Something inside him has been wearing thin, so thin, and now it's just... gone. Life support has been turned off. There's nothing to pull him back anymore, nothing so stop him falling - and he does that now. Bit by bit something inside him is falling away, dripping out in his blood and the food he can't keep down. It feels a lot like dying, but without the death. 

So, he washes his wings and winds a towel around his waist, back twitching with phantoms pain from the degenerating muscle that lies limp between his shoulder blades. He feels empty, a fleshed out fruit. There's a darkness inside, one that only spills out behind him, and he feels like an imploding star - pulled inwards, always. He's living in a single neuron, dead tissue all around him. 

And; 

James walks in. 

###### 

Nicky doesn't pick up his phone and Richey doesn't know why he thought he would. Rachel calls him back and tells them they're out on a date and Nicky can't talk right now, but if Richey calls back tomorrow Nicky will be free. 

James texts him. When Richey stares at them he only sees each tiny pixel individually, blinking and flashing against his dry eyes. He didn't mean to plan this, but the money in his wallet tells him otherwise. Ever since Nicky found out, the edges of his being have become his straining, fraying center. Soon there will be nothing left, no red thread there to make him up; just the black of the infection spread across his back, the sickly, greying shades of ravaged flesh that stand for nothing and will fall for everything.  
  
 **WHERE R U**  
 **RICHEY WE CAN TALK ABOUT THIS**  
 **RICHEY**  
 **RICH PLEASE. COME BACK**

_Manic Street Preachers_ , he hears on the car radio, and it sounds like the end. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry if the ending is bad, I've always been bad at ending stuff
> 
> It's been 20 years and 6 days since Richey's disappearance


End file.
